Rat on the Road: Uyuni Salt Flats

Bolivia is often described as one of the poorest countries in South America, so you have to take your hat off to them for the way they have preserved the Uyuni Salt Flats in spite of the extroadinary commercial pressure they must be under. With moble phones, electric cars, and powertools demanding ever more litium for their rechargeable batteries, Bolivia is sitting on that proverbial goldmine - the 10,000 sq.km of Salinas de Uyuni alone account for more than half of the entire world´s litium reserves.

Even though you could argue it´s worth more to the country for the tourism it brings in, good for them. For me, the Uyuni Salt Flats are right up there with Glacier Perito Moreno as the most extraordinary sight I have come across on this tour. How they formed couldn´t be easier to explain. Basically, what was once a sea evaporated, and left behind a gargantuan plane of salt.

You can either do a one-day tour, or a three-day tour that also takes you to see volcanoes, flamengos and whatnot. This is where Noah and I parted ways with the girls, as we just didn´t have the patience to see anything other than the salt flats.

Like all tours, it starts with a detour to a market.

4 wheel-drives are a must.

As are sunglasses.

Nothing but miles and miles of salt.

A word of advice. The choice of tour is important as some of them shy away from going to the areas that are flooded - for safety reasons. You need to shop around and ask. If there´s any chance of seeing the flooded parts, do it. This is because when the water floods over the flat white surface area, it creates a sort of a mirror effect that, from certain angles, makes the horizon disappear. It is one of the most astounding visual effects you will ever come across, as Noah and I were lucky enough to have done, and the girls weren´t. But then, they got to see flamengos.

Unlike the girls, our tour also brought us to the "Fish Island", a rather surreal cactus island at very centre of the salt flats, about 80km in from the edge, where we dabbled with a bit of perpective photography.